Closable Food Dish With Twitter Notification

Introduction: Closable Food Dish With Twitter Notification

Hello! Welcome to my first Instructable! Here I'll be showing you how to make my homemade closable food container that sends a Twitter notification every time your pet goes to eat.

Step 1: Materials

Here's what you need in order to make this work. Now, this project is very flexible, so you can substitute some parts out. Here's what I used:

Arduino Uno

Rfid tag and sensor

Ethernet shield

Some jumper cables

An old DVD player, or anything with a DC motor, and keep it's other insides.

Cardboard and any material that you want to house your pet feeder in

A bowl for the food

An ethernet cable

A 9v plugin that's compatible with the Arduino. (So that you can just plug this device into the wall after you get done coding)

Step 2: Preparing the DVD Player

Basically, just take apart all of the inner components of the DVD player. I had worked with a rather large one, so I recommend working with one that's a little smaller. Figure out which buttons work the CD tray, and reuse them as your buttons that you'll push to open and close the tray whenever you need to.

This part is pretty self explanatory, just make sure that you "trim the fat" with hardware that you don't need, but salvage anything that you need to keep that CD tray working.

You can see that I saved the power supply cord, the on/off button, the CD tray, and the long circuit board that had the button that opens and closes the tray.

Step 5: Put It All Inside Your Container / Final Product!

Just like it says, put it all inside the container, put in the food bowl, position the rfid so that it is next to the food bowl, place the tag around your pet's collar, and then just let them have at it! My cat took to it right away.

I hope this tutorial was helpful! This project is very open to modification, but this is the "low budget" version!

Enjoy!

Here's a Youtube video showing the cat eating from the dish, and the dish sending a signal to Twitter to let me know that he's using it: